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As part of its seven-year journey to Mercury, one year after launch, the spacecraft zipped around Earth, getting an orbit correction from Earth’s gravity and getting a chance to test its instruments by observing its home planet.

This image is a view of South America and portions of North America and Africa from the Mercury Dual Imaging System’s wide-angle camera aboard MESSENGER.

The wide-angle camera records light at eleven different wavelengths, including visible and infrared light.

Combining blue, red, and green light results in a true-color image from the observations.

an updated version of the famous the famous "Blue Marble" photograph taken by Apollo astronauts. The digital image uses data collected in 1997 from several satellites to approximate what a human could see from orbit, with the added artistic license of having the Moon in the background.

The image substitutes infrared light for blue light in the three-band combination.

The resulting image is crisper than the natural color version because our atmosphere scatters blue light.

Infrared light, however, passes through the atmosphere with relatively little scattering and allows a clearer view.

In this image, the plants on Earth look red.

Plants reflect near-infrared light more strongly than either red or green, and in this band combination, near-infrared is assigned to look red.

Apart from getting a clearer image, the substitution reveals more information than natural color.